A tasting held earlier this summer in Brooklyn, New York, might have confused anyone accustomed to sipping genteelly from a wine glass. In the backyard of a shop, a fan strafed sweaty people sitting on folding chairs. A scruffy man in jeans and a T-shirt raised his voice above the whir to introduce the first pairing, a thimble-size tumbler of dark liquid and a bit of cheese. When glasses met lips, noses crinkled: The liquid was beer—and it was sour.

The shop, Bierkraft (“beer strength” in German), sells gourmet cheese and beer from small, independent breweries and is at the fore of a shift in American brewing. Craft beer is the fastest-growing segment in the $4 billion industry, and it’s helping change beer’s image: The rough-and-tumble tipple is now sometimes considered an after-dinner drink on par with wine and brandy.

It’s no accident that four of the five sour beers offered that evening come from Belgium (where sour beer is just a small niche in the country’s brewing scene). Belgian ales, styles taken up more recently by American craft brewers, are leading the craft-beer charge. Since January, U.S. grocery and convenience stores have sold .64 percent fewer cases of beer versus the first seven months of 2006, according to Information Resources, a Chicago-based firm that monitors sales. Meanwhile, craft-beer sales have risen, and Belgian-style ales are doing even better, with sales up almost 31 percent.

“One in three of our customers is looking to pair beer with food,” says Ben Granger, one of Bierkraft’s owners. “If a wine drinker comes in, I’ll definitely point them to a Belgian. It’s a gateway beer.”

Belgian styles are more complex—more wine-like in their subtleties—than the mass-produced German-style lagers that dominate the American market. In Germany, the Reinheitsgebot, a purity law dating from 1516, limits brewers to four ingredients: barley, hops, yeast, and water. Budweiser and the other big beer companies use rice and corn instead of barley, but with pretty bland results. The monks who traditionally brew Belgian ales, however, use fruit, spices, and other unorthodox ingredients.

“In Belgium,” says Joe Carroll, the owner of Spuyten Duyvil, a Brooklyn bar that specializes in beer and cheese, there’s a tradition of “taking some risks and doing some things that in the German or English tradition would be verboten.”

Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, thinks that Belgian beer’s stylish packaging—it often comes in corked 750-milliliter bottles—appeals to wine drinkers.

“People say that Belgian beer comes in champagne bottles,” he says, “but actually, champagne comes in beer bottles. We’ve been doing it a lot longer.”

It’s no coincidence. Both champagne and Belgian-style ale go through a fermentation process in the bottle that produces the bubbles. For champagne, this is called the méthode champenoise. Brewers know it as bottle conditioning.

Brooklyn Brewery’s newest beer, the “Belgian-inspired” Brooklyn Local 1, is bottle-conditioned; a corked, 750ml bottle costs $7 to $12—as much as a six pack of the company’s other beer. A higher price point and fancy glassware created by Belgian brewers contribute to Belgian beer’s upmarket image. It may be little more than clever marketing, but the chalices, goblets, snifters, and flutes that hold the ale are more reminiscent of wineglasses than the stocky pint glasses popular in English and American pubs. (See "The Science of Beer Glasses.")
 

Belgium’s role in craft beer’s rise is evident on the menus of some of New York’s better restaurants. The bill of fare for the Modern at MOMA lists 12 bottled beers, seven of which are Belgian style. At Gramercy Tavern, the Belgians make up 13 out of 23. (Both restaurants are part of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, but each establishes its beer list independently.)

“Our beer menu doesn’t play second fiddle to the wine list,” asserts Kevin Garry, the assistant beverage director at Gramercy Tavern. Last November, Garry put about 2,000 bottles of beer in the wine cellar as part of a vintage-beer program. When a wine critic came to the restaurant with some friends for a quick meal, Garry showed him the vintage-beer list. “They were there for four hours and ended up trying almost every beer on the list.”

When Coors decided to enter the craft-beer market, in 1995, it went Belgian. Brewmaster Keith Villa had just returned from the University of Brussels with a doctorate in brewing chemistry. “Coors saw the craft-brew movement starting to gain traction,” says Villa. “I was given an assignment to develop a new craft beer.” The result, Blue Moon, is arguably America’s best-known Belgian-style ale. It aspires to be a craft beer—the label doesn’t say Coors—but its provenance puts it firmly in the industrial sector, and the Brewers Association, which represents American craft brewers, doesn’t consider Blue Moon a craft beer.

Like wineries, craft breweries are usually small operations with strong regional associations. This was evident at Brewery Ommegang’s Belgian-style beerfest in Cooperstown, New York, this July. Attendees walked, then stumbled, from table to table with small glasses, tasting Belgian-style offerings from across the Northeast. Simon Wurst, from Wolaver’s, a Vermont brewery, was pouring an organic ale made with unmalted wheat from a local farm. “There is a renaissance now where people are trying to support the farmers as well as the local brewers,” he says. “We’re pushing to get farmers involved in getting us barley. We’ve been talking about having local coffee roasters roast the barley.”

The night before, a couple from New Paltz, New York, attended the beer dinner, seven courses paired with various Belgian-style ales. They spoke about their interests—guitars, motorcycles, and, of course, home brewing. They were most excited about the last beer of the night, a special batch of Ommegang’s kriek. (“Don’t ask,” said the menu. “It’s not for sale at any price.”)

American-made krieks are difficult to find, and this one had a dry, champagne-like acidity cut through with sweet Belgian cherries. If it were wine, a one-off like this might have fetched hundreds of dollars. But it was beer, and when it arrived at the table in a plastic pitcher, no one seemed to mind.